12-09-2020, 11:47 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-10-2020, 05:56 PM by Asked Madden.)
So, if I remember correctly, this is the last season the current iteration of the Sim is going to be used for the ISFL. As someone who joined in the r/nfl class of Season 25, I'm a newbie to the league, I've only been here three seasons, and yet I learned to dislike the sim...probably somewhere around halfway through the first week of the prospect bowl? This sim is broken beyond belief, it is one of the first things you will learn when you watch the videos, hang around discord chat, or just ask around about what stats to improve as a player. There's not any proof of this, but I have a sneaking suspicion/conspiracy theory that the sim was created by European Football fans who thought they were making a competitor to Football Manager until 5 days before the game shipped and then had to scramble quickly to make a football game. Either that or they just could not code it. This conspiracy theory of mine came about because it's clear that they didn't have a clue how to make a game that actually plays like American Football. I decided to go over all the most obvious ways that this sim acts and plays nothing like real football, and in some cases worse than modern MADDEN. Reminder, modern Madden is the thing people claim should be used as proof that EA isn't putting their copyright for Simulation NFL football to use.
Punting in Field Goal Range
My best guess is that this is the one that most directly leads to wins turning into losses, at least the most often thing. The good old fashioned punt from the 30-35 yard line, especially when you are 3 points or less from a win! These punts also go into the end zone, because coffin corner punts are apparently not a thing, and thus the approximate field position change is 10-15 yards! Definitely worth giving up a better than a coin flip chance to win or tie a game, especially in the waning minutes of the 4th.
Punting Length in General
A more minor one, but Punts from deep in a team's own territory basically by rule go longer than punts inside opponent territory. It's NOTABLE when people do 30 yard punts from within their own 20 yard line. Things that happen about once per season in the NFL can happen multiple times PER GAME, because it appears that the way punting works in the sim is just a 1/3 chance of a 30 yarder, a 40+ yarder, or a 60+ yarder.
Sim Aggressiveness
Fourth Down. Fourth down is maybe the worst thing to see in the sim, because the sim can go absolutely stupid on 4th down. Whether it's going for it on 4th down twice on the first two drives within the team's own 40 in week 1 between Baltimore and Chicago just this season, to the more common sight of a team nearing field goal range, down by three or less, punting on 4th and 1 or so with 4 minutes left and an almost certainty that they weren't getting the ball back, this might be the most AGONIZING one, especially because it often comes combined with the punting in field goal range. That's one for the surrender index!
DTs are Edge Rushers, and Vice Versa
Bear with me a moment, this is going to sound like a detour at first. I've heard a lot of dumb football opinions, like Brady being the best Super Bowl QB ever (Montana was easily better), Randy Moss is the best Wide Receiver of all time (I'd put TO above Moss and knock Moss down to 3rd before I'd EVER put Moss as number 1 above Jerry Rice), or the ever common Emmitt Smith being the best running back ever from Cowboys fans, when he's arguably not even the best running back over the course of his career. But there's one that is the most entertaining to me. A friend of mine once said that Khalil Mack was better than Aaron Donald, during the offseason between 2017 and 2018, a couple weeks before Mack would be traded to the Bears and a season would start that would end that debate forever. And they were a Raiders fan, too. The reason they gave was that it is easier to get stats as a Defensive Tackle than it is as an edge rusher. If you know anything about the NFL, you know this is ridiculous, and part of the reason Aaron Donald's had an argument for best player in the league for 5 straight years is because he'll put up elite Edge Rusher stats as a Defensive Tackle. In the sim, everyone is Aaron Donald, DTs get more stats than Edge Rushers, and DEs are meant to be run containers more than anything else; the entire dynamic is swapped around from the way it is in real life.
WRs are Beast Mode
It's a pretty common occurrence, as in it happens a couple times per game, that a wide receiver will catch a pass and then proceed to drag one or more defensive players behind them for 20 or 30 yards as if they are a hippo being attacked by a pride of lions. I'm calling it beast mode because the only thing that comes to mind to describe it in football terms are it and other similarly legendary runs where defensive players just are unable to tackle a guy, and that might even be what they were trying to go for when designing the sim. The problems are: this happens way too commonly for such legendary runs, the player positions involved are completely different and don't make sense, the Beast Mode runs are bruiser RBs against usually Cornerbacks and Safeties as opposed to wide receivers, and the way it's depicted makes it seem more like a particularly difficult child hanging onto an adult's leg as the adult tries to walk, dragging them down the field before getting tripped up.
WRs Forgot to Upgrade their Stamina Wheel
Listen, I know the Master Sword is a powerful weapon, but upgrading Stamina is so much more useful in the long run. Wait, wrong game. Anyways, Wide Receivers whenever they're far enough from the end zone will suddenly slow to a crawl while running with the ball for long enough. This is apparently due to the endurance stat, but as far as I've seen, the only times a player gets chased down from behind like that is when they're a big man who wasn't supposed to have the ball for 80+ yards, or from a player who's all too cocky on a big play, and the way that works isn't a guy going from 100% to 30% in an instant. It also doesn't happen at the 30 yard line.
Penalties Don't Make Sense
Well, OK, sometimes they do. I don't think I've ever seen a chop block not coming from an offensive lineman. On the other hand, pass interference from a defensive lineman who rushed the passer, unnecessary roughness coming from a QB who didn't come into contact with anyone to rough, Delay of Game on people who aren't the QB, there are plenty of penalties that either have the wrong player or the wrong penalty associated with them.
However the Fuck Speed Functions in the Sim
This is the big one. It has multiple parts, but let's start with the most basic one: There are points where it is BETTER to be slower than faster. If you have 80 speed as a Game Manager QB, you are slower than if you are a 79 speed QB. If you're a big, heavy RB, you are faster at 79 speed than you are at 80 speed, and you will only be outsped by the speed backs once they have gone above 90 speed. Next up, Quarterbacks. 79 Speed Game Manager makes you have the passing ability of Aaron Rodgers and the running ability of Lamar Jackson. Maybe a slight exaggeration, but seriously, 79 speed makes you go faster than mobile QBs who are maxed out on speed, much less ones with a paltry 85 speed or something like that. You get that along with having better caps to passing and not needing to use around 200 TPE on raising your speed stat up. Suffice to say I'm pretty sure there's a REASON nobody currently in the ISFL uses the Mobile QB archetype.
Home Field Advantage
You know what the given home field advantage is for teams in the NFL, generally? 3 points. Maybe slightly higher if you have particularly good home field advantage, like the 12th man Seahawks, or less if you're playing a team with a massive fanbase spread around the country, or are in a particular situation that means not many home fans will attend. If you combine both in extreme enough circumstances, like the Raiders playing in the Chargers' borrowed soccer stadium after leaving their fanbase in San Diego, then you might not have Home Field advantage at all! That means the difference between playing one team away vs one team home is less than a touchdown and the associated extra point. To give an idea what that means in terms of odds, let's look at one of the clearest examples of 2 pretty evenly matched teams with a 3 point spread decided by Home and Away: Chiefs vs Rams 2018. The odds in that game were almost even, they favored the Rams by a slight margin. The chance for the Rams to win that game was less than 55%. In the sim, the odds for the Rams to win that game would be around 65%. The entire system that saps a yard or two away from Away plays and gives a yard or two to Home plays tips the scales so far in the favor of whoever's playing that it's a parody of the idea of Home Field advantage. A top tier team will go away to a bottom feeder and be lucky to have a 45% chance of winning the game. It's to the point that the fact the sim takes into account the inflated chance of penalties for the visiting team, something that actually happens in the NFL, feels like it's piling on too much because of how terrible everything else treats the Away team already.
Run vs Pass Play
One of the subtler problems with the sim is that a play is designated a run or a pass play from the very beginning. This will most notably show up when long pass plays where everyone is covered and there's tons of space in front of the QB, he will never travel beyond the line and use his legs to pick up a first down. To be fair, this strategy is something only the most nimble and mobile of QBs could pull off, such as Phillip Rivers, or Jared Goff, or Ben Roethlisberger. In case the text isn't obvious, that's sarcasm.
Everything that Makes a Hurry Up Offense Impossible
Another super-category! Let's start with perhaps the most minor one, The Sim Will Randomly Spike the Ball for No Reason. In the NFL, the spike has already fallen somewhat out of favor because it doesn't take that much more time off the clock to do another play in a no huddle than to spike the ball and waste a down. The sim will spike whenever possible, even times that wouldn't make sense to spike the ball. Of course, this ignores that spiking the ball at all is basically useless, because the sim Takes an Extra 20 Seconds off the Clock for every Completed Pass or Run. There's really no excuse for this, teams can snap the ball in 20 seconds even without being in the hurry up, and when the clock's ticking and they need more time, a football team can hurry up to the line and spike the ball extremely quickly, maybe 10 to 15 seconds for a 15 yard play. And even worse, when a timeout is used, the clock shouldn't run at all. Instead, we get situations like what happened tonight with the Yeti. Down by 3, the Yeti drove down towards field goal range, and, starting right before the 2 minute warning that also isn't implemented, this is how the drive went. 7 yard rush with 2:04 on the clock, timeout. 20 seconds off the clock for a 7 yard rush with a timeout immediately afterwards. 6 yard pass play, timeout, 26 seconds off the clock. This problem reaches its peak with long pass plays with a timeout immediately after it, as with the next play, a 36 yard pass play followed by a timeout which took 46 seconds off of the clock, draining the clock from 1:18 to 0:32. But, the ball's on the 12 now. Unfortunately, the Yeti now have another problem: There is a Dead Zone where the Sim thinks it can Run Another Play, but the Clock will run out if the Play isn't Fast. This dead zone is about 30-40 seconds left, at least as far as I can tell. Less than 30 seconds and the sim decides to kick a field goal. More than 40 and only an EXTREMELY long play will end the game immediately, although with a long enough play, that can happen. The play begins, 5 step dropback, rollout to the right, pass to Batista 4 yards away from the end zone, Batista runs 4 yards, gets tackled. The play went 12 yards. The chat celebrates the last second miracle touchdown. And then people notice that the touchdown line didn't come up in the play by play. Also, neither is the field goal attempt. The Yeti lost on the one inch line with a pass play that definitely didn't take 32 seconds, but did because the sim says so.
Note that none of this involves the cosmetics of the sim, such as the random player that will appear on the field behind the line of scrimmage that appears to not exist for the purposes of the Offsides call, but also doesn't do anything. Or the fact that it doesn't show incomplete passes, or how it decides if a pass is incomplete before it decides how it was incomplete. Everything listed here is a major problem that is damning for the purposes of a supposed high quality Football Simulation, or even a low quality one, and none of these are a problem in even Madden. Unless you count the fact that users will often go for it on 4th and 10 because screw punting.
In summation, I'd like to finish off with a number of quotes I received when I told people I was making this list on Discord:
"Fuck the sim"
Faded
"the sim doesn't even know what a DE is"
Thiath
(in response to what beef does he have with the sim)
"Stupid penalties, hidden stats, an engine that makes it up as it goes along"
Adam S
"I'm looking forward to the new sim so much lol. thanks for pointing out every reason why"
Zeagle1
![[Image: image0.png]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/317388657994760194/786422142032019516/image0.png)
Joefish
(2526 words)
Punting in Field Goal Range
My best guess is that this is the one that most directly leads to wins turning into losses, at least the most often thing. The good old fashioned punt from the 30-35 yard line, especially when you are 3 points or less from a win! These punts also go into the end zone, because coffin corner punts are apparently not a thing, and thus the approximate field position change is 10-15 yards! Definitely worth giving up a better than a coin flip chance to win or tie a game, especially in the waning minutes of the 4th.
Punting Length in General
A more minor one, but Punts from deep in a team's own territory basically by rule go longer than punts inside opponent territory. It's NOTABLE when people do 30 yard punts from within their own 20 yard line. Things that happen about once per season in the NFL can happen multiple times PER GAME, because it appears that the way punting works in the sim is just a 1/3 chance of a 30 yarder, a 40+ yarder, or a 60+ yarder.
Sim Aggressiveness
Fourth Down. Fourth down is maybe the worst thing to see in the sim, because the sim can go absolutely stupid on 4th down. Whether it's going for it on 4th down twice on the first two drives within the team's own 40 in week 1 between Baltimore and Chicago just this season, to the more common sight of a team nearing field goal range, down by three or less, punting on 4th and 1 or so with 4 minutes left and an almost certainty that they weren't getting the ball back, this might be the most AGONIZING one, especially because it often comes combined with the punting in field goal range. That's one for the surrender index!
DTs are Edge Rushers, and Vice Versa
Bear with me a moment, this is going to sound like a detour at first. I've heard a lot of dumb football opinions, like Brady being the best Super Bowl QB ever (Montana was easily better), Randy Moss is the best Wide Receiver of all time (I'd put TO above Moss and knock Moss down to 3rd before I'd EVER put Moss as number 1 above Jerry Rice), or the ever common Emmitt Smith being the best running back ever from Cowboys fans, when he's arguably not even the best running back over the course of his career. But there's one that is the most entertaining to me. A friend of mine once said that Khalil Mack was better than Aaron Donald, during the offseason between 2017 and 2018, a couple weeks before Mack would be traded to the Bears and a season would start that would end that debate forever. And they were a Raiders fan, too. The reason they gave was that it is easier to get stats as a Defensive Tackle than it is as an edge rusher. If you know anything about the NFL, you know this is ridiculous, and part of the reason Aaron Donald's had an argument for best player in the league for 5 straight years is because he'll put up elite Edge Rusher stats as a Defensive Tackle. In the sim, everyone is Aaron Donald, DTs get more stats than Edge Rushers, and DEs are meant to be run containers more than anything else; the entire dynamic is swapped around from the way it is in real life.
WRs are Beast Mode
It's a pretty common occurrence, as in it happens a couple times per game, that a wide receiver will catch a pass and then proceed to drag one or more defensive players behind them for 20 or 30 yards as if they are a hippo being attacked by a pride of lions. I'm calling it beast mode because the only thing that comes to mind to describe it in football terms are it and other similarly legendary runs where defensive players just are unable to tackle a guy, and that might even be what they were trying to go for when designing the sim. The problems are: this happens way too commonly for such legendary runs, the player positions involved are completely different and don't make sense, the Beast Mode runs are bruiser RBs against usually Cornerbacks and Safeties as opposed to wide receivers, and the way it's depicted makes it seem more like a particularly difficult child hanging onto an adult's leg as the adult tries to walk, dragging them down the field before getting tripped up.
WRs Forgot to Upgrade their Stamina Wheel
Listen, I know the Master Sword is a powerful weapon, but upgrading Stamina is so much more useful in the long run. Wait, wrong game. Anyways, Wide Receivers whenever they're far enough from the end zone will suddenly slow to a crawl while running with the ball for long enough. This is apparently due to the endurance stat, but as far as I've seen, the only times a player gets chased down from behind like that is when they're a big man who wasn't supposed to have the ball for 80+ yards, or from a player who's all too cocky on a big play, and the way that works isn't a guy going from 100% to 30% in an instant. It also doesn't happen at the 30 yard line.
Penalties Don't Make Sense
Well, OK, sometimes they do. I don't think I've ever seen a chop block not coming from an offensive lineman. On the other hand, pass interference from a defensive lineman who rushed the passer, unnecessary roughness coming from a QB who didn't come into contact with anyone to rough, Delay of Game on people who aren't the QB, there are plenty of penalties that either have the wrong player or the wrong penalty associated with them.
However the Fuck Speed Functions in the Sim
This is the big one. It has multiple parts, but let's start with the most basic one: There are points where it is BETTER to be slower than faster. If you have 80 speed as a Game Manager QB, you are slower than if you are a 79 speed QB. If you're a big, heavy RB, you are faster at 79 speed than you are at 80 speed, and you will only be outsped by the speed backs once they have gone above 90 speed. Next up, Quarterbacks. 79 Speed Game Manager makes you have the passing ability of Aaron Rodgers and the running ability of Lamar Jackson. Maybe a slight exaggeration, but seriously, 79 speed makes you go faster than mobile QBs who are maxed out on speed, much less ones with a paltry 85 speed or something like that. You get that along with having better caps to passing and not needing to use around 200 TPE on raising your speed stat up. Suffice to say I'm pretty sure there's a REASON nobody currently in the ISFL uses the Mobile QB archetype.
Home Field Advantage
You know what the given home field advantage is for teams in the NFL, generally? 3 points. Maybe slightly higher if you have particularly good home field advantage, like the 12th man Seahawks, or less if you're playing a team with a massive fanbase spread around the country, or are in a particular situation that means not many home fans will attend. If you combine both in extreme enough circumstances, like the Raiders playing in the Chargers' borrowed soccer stadium after leaving their fanbase in San Diego, then you might not have Home Field advantage at all! That means the difference between playing one team away vs one team home is less than a touchdown and the associated extra point. To give an idea what that means in terms of odds, let's look at one of the clearest examples of 2 pretty evenly matched teams with a 3 point spread decided by Home and Away: Chiefs vs Rams 2018. The odds in that game were almost even, they favored the Rams by a slight margin. The chance for the Rams to win that game was less than 55%. In the sim, the odds for the Rams to win that game would be around 65%. The entire system that saps a yard or two away from Away plays and gives a yard or two to Home plays tips the scales so far in the favor of whoever's playing that it's a parody of the idea of Home Field advantage. A top tier team will go away to a bottom feeder and be lucky to have a 45% chance of winning the game. It's to the point that the fact the sim takes into account the inflated chance of penalties for the visiting team, something that actually happens in the NFL, feels like it's piling on too much because of how terrible everything else treats the Away team already.
Run vs Pass Play
One of the subtler problems with the sim is that a play is designated a run or a pass play from the very beginning. This will most notably show up when long pass plays where everyone is covered and there's tons of space in front of the QB, he will never travel beyond the line and use his legs to pick up a first down. To be fair, this strategy is something only the most nimble and mobile of QBs could pull off, such as Phillip Rivers, or Jared Goff, or Ben Roethlisberger. In case the text isn't obvious, that's sarcasm.
Everything that Makes a Hurry Up Offense Impossible
Another super-category! Let's start with perhaps the most minor one, The Sim Will Randomly Spike the Ball for No Reason. In the NFL, the spike has already fallen somewhat out of favor because it doesn't take that much more time off the clock to do another play in a no huddle than to spike the ball and waste a down. The sim will spike whenever possible, even times that wouldn't make sense to spike the ball. Of course, this ignores that spiking the ball at all is basically useless, because the sim Takes an Extra 20 Seconds off the Clock for every Completed Pass or Run. There's really no excuse for this, teams can snap the ball in 20 seconds even without being in the hurry up, and when the clock's ticking and they need more time, a football team can hurry up to the line and spike the ball extremely quickly, maybe 10 to 15 seconds for a 15 yard play. And even worse, when a timeout is used, the clock shouldn't run at all. Instead, we get situations like what happened tonight with the Yeti. Down by 3, the Yeti drove down towards field goal range, and, starting right before the 2 minute warning that also isn't implemented, this is how the drive went. 7 yard rush with 2:04 on the clock, timeout. 20 seconds off the clock for a 7 yard rush with a timeout immediately afterwards. 6 yard pass play, timeout, 26 seconds off the clock. This problem reaches its peak with long pass plays with a timeout immediately after it, as with the next play, a 36 yard pass play followed by a timeout which took 46 seconds off of the clock, draining the clock from 1:18 to 0:32. But, the ball's on the 12 now. Unfortunately, the Yeti now have another problem: There is a Dead Zone where the Sim thinks it can Run Another Play, but the Clock will run out if the Play isn't Fast. This dead zone is about 30-40 seconds left, at least as far as I can tell. Less than 30 seconds and the sim decides to kick a field goal. More than 40 and only an EXTREMELY long play will end the game immediately, although with a long enough play, that can happen. The play begins, 5 step dropback, rollout to the right, pass to Batista 4 yards away from the end zone, Batista runs 4 yards, gets tackled. The play went 12 yards. The chat celebrates the last second miracle touchdown. And then people notice that the touchdown line didn't come up in the play by play. Also, neither is the field goal attempt. The Yeti lost on the one inch line with a pass play that definitely didn't take 32 seconds, but did because the sim says so.
Note that none of this involves the cosmetics of the sim, such as the random player that will appear on the field behind the line of scrimmage that appears to not exist for the purposes of the Offsides call, but also doesn't do anything. Or the fact that it doesn't show incomplete passes, or how it decides if a pass is incomplete before it decides how it was incomplete. Everything listed here is a major problem that is damning for the purposes of a supposed high quality Football Simulation, or even a low quality one, and none of these are a problem in even Madden. Unless you count the fact that users will often go for it on 4th and 10 because screw punting.
In summation, I'd like to finish off with a number of quotes I received when I told people I was making this list on Discord:
"Fuck the sim"
Faded
"the sim doesn't even know what a DE is"
Thiath
(in response to what beef does he have with the sim)
"Stupid penalties, hidden stats, an engine that makes it up as it goes along"
Adam S
"I'm looking forward to the new sim so much lol. thanks for pointing out every reason why"
Zeagle1
Joefish
(2526 words)
![[Image: simo_393.gif]](https://sig.grumpybumpers.com/host/simo_393.gif)
![[Image: unknown.png]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/728419684394860664/768843250789908500/unknown.png)
![[Image: unknown.png]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/728419684394860664/768843509612412998/unknown.png)
